Ultimately, being nice as a leader is selfish. It doesn’t serve the team. It serves your ego. The team is looking to you to help them achieve a goal. And instead, you’re looking to have your decisions, actions, and yourself perceived as positive by them.

I wonder if it's a useful way of distinguishing peoples' outlook based on whether they believe this is true or whether they believe such things can be planned beforehand: "The primary way to discover failure is via the increasing entropy of a growing number of humans running around the building – good intentions in hand – breaking things."

GREAT -- approaches this broad topic from the POV of someone who is changing careers, or getting back into the workforce. None of this is hard or mind-blowing, just goes against conventional wisdom. Way more human-centric!

A: That's a good question, and I don't know the answer. But if I were to speculate, I bet it doesn't take a lot of baking to change your hands a little bit. But if you really want those total baker hands, I think that's touching bread as much as you touch people.

"Control is not the right paradigm. The job is guidance, sometimes tight, sometimes loose. Sometimes the “writing” is flowing, sometimes it needs to coaxed and forced. The manager (a better word is “producer”) has to understand the creative process: what is needed? what does the work want?"

oof: 'Kill or be killed seems to be accepted as a mode of operation. One employee expressed the feeling that they live in fear of being fired every day at an executive meeting. A vice president named Karen Barragan was said to have responded: “Good, because fear drives you.” Barragan disputed the account.'

using security thinking to frame a (possibly) different way of looking at Jenkins: 'People sometimes joke that Jenkins is “cron with a web UI”, but I will typically refer to it as “remote code execution as a service.” '

"Before you introduce the idea you want to play Devil’s advocate for, say something like “D’you mind if I play Devil’s advocate for a moment?” And when the group tells you “Yes, we do mind. Why help the devil?” listen to them."

"When folks want you to commit to more work than you believe you can deliver, your goal is to provide a compelling explanation of how your team finishes work. Finishes is particularly important, as opposed to does, because partial work has no value, and your team's defining constraints are often in the finishing stages."

Digging into more specifics of this principle of writing: "Bottoms up thinking is good for developing your idea, but bad for communicating it. This is why decoupling into thinking and writing is useful. (It's fine to think in writing, just don't try to reuse the thinking bits for communicating to others. Very similar to "plan to throw one away" from Fred Brooks.)"

'I’ve told this story before, but years later I ran into him, and he said, “Most people in this town stab you in the back, but you stabbed me in the front, and I appreciate that.” I said, “Anytime, you son of a bitch.” It was a great moment. I’m so glad he’s dead. Seriously, I’m glad he’s dead. He was a jackass. He deserved it.'

"...And most importantly, it puts the initiative squarely on the shoulders of your team, which is almost always where it belongs. They aren’t going to learn how to make good decisions, set good goals, or write effective docs, if you are always there providing a safety net or taking over the hard work from them."

"Once, when contemplating the apparently endless growth of administrative responsibilities in British academic departments, I came up with one possible vision of hell. Hell is a collection of individuals who are spending the bulk of their time working on a task they don't like and are not especially good at."

"So, perhaps for a final assignment (no matter the subject), students should be able to choose something they did earlier in the year and get a chance to improve on it. Make version 2. I think working on four things, and getting a chance to redo one of them would be more valuable than working on five separate things. It would be a better education."